


all the world in your register

by somethingmoresubtle



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Horror, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Praise Kink, Road Trip, because i haven't watched s2 yet and YKNOW, deeply thirsty tomas, inappropriate use of catholic background
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-03-07 11:04:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13433385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingmoresubtle/pseuds/somethingmoresubtle
Summary: Something happens on the road between Chicago and Tampa.Predictably, Marcus makes it worse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [put to death therefore what is earthly in you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13069737) by [Margo_Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim). 



Something happens on the road between Chicago and Tampa.

Predictably, Marcus makes it worse.

* * *

 

After Bennett stitches Marcus up with economical hands that made no pretense not to hurt, after the Rance family is bundled into a long idling car as Tomas wipes at his eyes, after-

Marcus finds himself on the sidewalk again, duffel slung over his shoulder and hat over his eyes. His breath steams in the air and he feels the tip of his nose going the particular numb that comes from long exposure to the cold. His feet, however, are very toasty. He’d nicked a pair of Bennett’s socks when he hadn’t been looking, warm and wool and holes only at the top where they should be. He’d considered tucking in a pair of his in exchange, but Marcus is sure Bennett will see the implicit gift in their absence. He looks forward to the terse text he’s sure to get in the future.

“Well,” Marcus says, and he feels like he’s said it a hundred times before in this agonizing detangling from the knot that Tomas- no, that Chicago, that the Rances had twisted him in, loop by invisible loop.

“Well,” Tomas parrots, wringing his hands in a way that would be invisible behind the pulpit. “Are you sure you have everything?”

He barks a laugh, and the steam of it almost reaches Tomas, whose cheeks are stained red beneath the loop of a scarf- handmade by the looks of it, maybe made by some bleeding heart parishioner that couldn’t bear to see a handsome priest shiver from the cold. “I think after the sixth check we got whatever dust I may have left behind. Unless you think I may have left some knickers behind the washer, or, or a sock in your laundry bin.” He grabs Tomas by the elbow, eyes mock serious underneath the brim of his hat. “Do you think we should check? I don’t know if I could live without my Tuesday boxers.”

Tomas laughs, and the closeness of it makes Marcus’ nose all the colder. “I have seen what you call socks. I would be doing mankind a kindness by separating you from those things.”

He pulls a face. “Surely you wouldn’t separate a man from his Tuesday boxers, even if you’re cruel enough to cast away his socks.”

“You could always turn Monday inside out. Or-“ and here Tomas transforms into every grandmother Marcus has ever seen as he, wonder of all wonders, wags an actual finger at him- “You could own _more_ than seven pairs of underwear.”

“Well now that’s just wasteful. Indulgent, even. A poor layman, me, being encouraged by Chicago’s own star priest to debase myself in mortal delights? Shameful.”

And at that, Tomas turns instantly tragic, and Marcus regrets not leaving half an hour ago, twenty minutes ago, weeks ago. Tomas doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone, leave _him_ alone.

“Marcus…” he begins, and Marcus doesn’t want to hear whatever tripe Tomas is going to sell him. 

“I should be off then,” he says, stepping away hoisting his bag more firmly over his shoulder. “Got a bus to catch.”

“Marcus-“

“Try your best to not have dreams of me, that’s not really something either of us need-”

“Marcus!” He shouts, and grabs him by the wrists. Marcus turns away, steeling himself.

“I want to go with you.” Tomas says, and when Marcus lets himself look, his face is horribly earnest, open like wounds are open.

It’s hard to articulate the awful sweep of hope that chokes up Marcus’ throat, followed by the loathing that’s kept him grounded for years.

“You don’t.” He says firmly, fists clenching, unclenching, brushing Tomas’ hands off him. “You don’t need to, God, _pretend_ at me. I know you’re staying.” Tomas takes a step back, and Marcus notices the cold’s bite more than before. The temperature must be dropping; a reminder that Marcus should really be going.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Tomas’ gaze turns back towards the ground and suddenly it’s easier to breathe without his eyes trying to peer past fifty odd years of poor living.

Impatient, Marcus waves a hand. “You’ve got your new parish, and a man my age doesn’t need his ego stroked, Tomas.” Somehow he keeps himself from slyly adding _not like you do_ , and he isn’t sure what’s keeping him from being as nasty as he needs to be. “Being an exorcist isn’t exactly a rollicking good time, and well.” He shrugs, tongue sitting bitter against his teeth. “It doesn’t take a genius to know hanging around me isn’t a rewarding experience either.”

That seems to stop Tomas out of whatever soft and broken thing he was feeling. His chin lifts, the line of his jaw resolute, and he looks Marcus in the eye. Marcus wants to turn away, to say something acid and biting that gets _Tomas_ to turn away, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, warm and protected as he walks away from Marcus and walks away from exorcism and walks back into the clean lit halls of his new and beautiful parish.

Marcus wants to say whatever he needs to keep Tomas as far away from him as possible, so far that he can’t go walking through Marcus’ memory in dreams, can’t breathe in the smoke from hastily smoked cigarettes outside shitty motel rooms, can’t stare at Marcus endlessly like Marcus has something worth giving. There is something frantic speaking at an unknowable frequency in the back of Marcus’ skull. It’s the same something that has him step back just before a demon lunges and snaps its teeth where his nose was a moment before. That keeps him from lowering his palm slowly to flame, from looking at a man possessed by something as petty and human as violence for too long when his teeth are already aching and his bones are the kind of weary he couldnt’ve imagined thirty years ago, when he thought a man couldn’t be more exhausted and live.

He wants to leave him behind.

“Take me with you.” Tomas says, and he is so goddamn bright that Marcus feels pity for those who had looked at angels.

He wants him to stay more.

Marcus blows out a long slow breath, and doesn’t quite look at how it radiates against Tomas’ face before dissipating. Mother Bernadette’s rosary is a heavy weight in his pocket, and he wraps a hand around the cold iron, biting edges. They stand there long enough in silence that it begins to warm, heads tipped together as if in benediction.

He clears his throat. “You better get a bag then.” Curses at how it comes out sweet. “And don’t forget my Sunday knickers.”

Tomas’ smile is quicksilver brilliance, and his hands grasp Marcus’ shoulders for just a second, not so long that Marcus should feel their absence when gone. “Thank you. Marcus. Marcus, you won’t regret it.” And he jogs off with the whoop of a man that already had a duffel packed, the brat. He pauses at the door and hollers, “They were your Tuesday underpants. Not Sunday.”

“They’re double duty,” Marcus yells, and wishes he had something to throw as Tomas ducks inside, laughing.

* * *

 

Later, there is some shuffling of papers and tickets and after a characteristically terse and efficient phone call to Bennett, Marcus has had another couple thousand transferred to his reloadable credit card, a beater that should get them at least to Tennessee, and Tomas loaded into the front seat.

Marcus can’t quite get his leg to stop jittering against the wheel well.

* * *

 

Casey was not the typical case. Although with something like exorcism there is never really typical, there is only some new and terrible twist that feeds on your fear, your weakness, your disgust, some new way to hurt those that are unloved and forgotten but. Marcus has never had to cut a man’s throat out in broad daylight before, either. Maybe if he hadn’t been so busy dithering about Tomas, he would have been paying more attention.

  
There’s no way they’re going back to big cities with bigger problems until they’re good and ready, because suddenly Tomas is magnetic north, pulling him inexorably, no longer a friendly disposable. After the previous shit show, Marcus wants to ease him in. There’s going to be enough accidental fuckups that he doesn’t need ones caused by Tomas’ pride as well. 

(It has nothing to do with the fact that he hasn’t heard God’s voice since the day at the river. Nothing to do with at all- he hasn’t even thought of it. Nothing to do with the way Gabriel’s body had felt in his arms, small and pitiful and broken in ways that even God couldn’t put back together.

On the list of things he isn’t thinking of, there is also this: he feels naked without his collar, more like a sham than he felt with it on, and once, on the edge of hysteria on another night with too little sleep, he doesn’t wonder if it was a homing beacon for God to find him, and without it, he’s lost. It’s fucking stupid, but that’s why he isn’t thinking it.

Much more often, he isn’t turning over thoughts about last straws, and if God’s finally done with him.

Well.

If he bothered with that kind of nonsense, he wouldn’t be thinking things like that, anyway.)

* * *

 

Marcus, if he had his pick, would have some kind of training program. Nothing like _his_ training program, where he’d been shoved into a metal box with twelve other boys who stank of fear and whose faces trembled in the flickering candlelight. Nothing like throwing a child in a hole with nothing in it but the possessed and a bible and the sudden clear ring of God’s voice in a place where God should not, could not be. Something a little less English than that, a slow ramp up from demon teenie-boppers to a city full of the integrated like Chicago.

Unfortunately, they don’t have that kind of luxury. There aren’t enough exorcists in the world that they get anything as petty as choice.

They’re barely past Illinois’ border, less than a week into their aimless drive south before Bennett rings with a report of suspected possession in some podunk town swallowed up in the Mark Twain National Forest. When Marcus had picked up the phone and jammed it between shoulder and ear so he could keep both hands firmly on the wheel, he’d heard the click of at least four relays. Paranoid fucker. He makes sure to mention it as soon as he hears Bennett’s breath, with a bit of a sneer, because no one in the Vatican has enough balls to do anything but bend and scrape for him, and Marcus knows it drives him crazy.

When Bennett says the town’s name in his calm, cool, voice, Marcus almost loses it, and pulls over with a screech and the smell of burning rubber. Tomas is jolted from sleep from where he’d been drooling against the window, and looks like he’s ready to do some sleepily pissed bitching. He closes his mouth with an audible click at Marcus’ frantic waving.

“Bennett,” he says, voice tremulous with barely constrained laughter as he puts him on speaker. “Sorry, static, didn’t quite hear you. Can you repeat that?”

He makes an impatient noise. “Huzzah.”

Tomas looks at him, eyes wide and eyebrows imperiously arched as he mouths “Huzzah?”

Marcus’ mouth twists as he bites down a laugh. “Huzzah what, Bennett?”

Bennett clicks his tongue, and Marcus can imagine him peacefully stabbing him, face clearing as he gets rid of his most aggravating problem. (Marcus takes great pride in knowing that integrated demons in the Vatican come as a distant second. _He’s_ allowed to be prideful. He’s no priest.) “Huzzah, Missouri, Marcus, if you’re done being insufferable. A nun in the local parish has some concerns about one of the boys.”

Tomas, who Marcus hasn’t taken his eyes off of, is still slowly and gleefully mouthing the town name over and over again, rolling the word ‘round his tongue. He’s still got his eyebrows raised like an offended housewife. Marcus realizes he’s trying to impersonate Bennett, and can no longer deal with this phone call.

“Greatcheersbye,” he rattles into the phone before clicking it shut as Tomas leans in, giggling and shaking like a child. Marcus has to press his head against the meat of Tomas’ shoulder, he can’t catch his breath over the gleeful, ugly sounds leaving his mouth. Tomas is sleep-warm and smells vaguely like the fry oil from the last diner they stopped in and just, _there_.

Eventually, Tomas is calm enough to say 'good Lord' like exultation, and Marcus realizes the tightness in his throat has nothing to do with laughter.

“Huzzah,” he quips, and pulls back his hand from where it was curled around Tomas’ arm as naturally as possible. He doesn’t even know when it got there.

He places both hands back on the steering wheel. He shoulder checks despite the empty road, turns on his blinker, and shift the car back onto the tarmac.

It’s fine.

His heart thuds heavy through his wrist.

It’s fine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there is a town, and a possession, and Marcus feels some things that may inconvenience his working relationship.

Tomas’ voice is surprisingly bad for a man of the cloth.

Sometimes, when the radio or the tape deck plays a tune he recognizes, he’ll hum along artlessly, vibration skipping through octave and key without regard to the notes he should be following. It seems to be one of the few things Tomas isn’t ashamed of for doing poorly.

“The diocese despaired of me,” he says cheerfully. “When I first started prayer in Chicago, the district I was in felt very strongly about having the mass sung.” He smiles, and for a moment Marcus’ breath catches. “I think I chased away more parishioners than any other priest that year.”

“Guess a pretty face can’t make up for everything,” Marcus hears himself say, far away in mortification.

Tomas laughs, just a small huff of a thing, but Marcus can see his cheeks tinge red, something he’s slowly learning speaks of mischief. “My superiors said the same thing. That’s when the told me to start working harder at the gym.”

“A daring new vestment for the new priest: cutoff at the arms.” He quips, stuck somewhere between hilarity and discomfort all while his ears burned.

“Can you imagine?” Tomas says, and the leftover mania from earlier hits him hard, and they have to pull over for the second time in a christ-damned _hour_ to giggle like brain-addled fools.

 _Didn’t you ever have something beautiful_? says the shade of Tomas’ voice in memory.

 

* * *

 

Huzzah, Missouri is much less funny as they cross the county line and their car is suddenly surrounded by the thrash of crows’ wings, pecking and screaming in eerie too-human voices, the fleshy thud of their bodies and hollow bones breaking against the windshield and doors. Marcus swerves reflexively, and they follow the car’s movement like an angry shadow. Tomas is holding onto the ohshit bar and praying rapidly in what sounds like Spanish over the cacophony outside, not that it’s likely to do much good against bloody _birds_.

There is the painful call of a bullhorn, and the birds still whole enough to fly scatter. Breathing heavily, Marcus pulls off his seatbelt as Tomas climbs out of the car without thinking to check if it was safe or not or whether the car was _actually in park,_ the bloody fool. He hears him curse, and hears the slick sound of blood on shoes, two sounds too familiar. Marcus is still stepping out of the car and brushing the black of beating wings from his eyes when he sees her. Blunt, face akin to a battleaxe, built like a car from the sixties- sturdy and meant to last. The wimple almost seems like an afterthought.

“Jesus fuck,” she says in a flat drawl. “Are you the best we could get?”

 

* * *

 

It turns out that yes, the boy is very possessed, and yes, a washed-up ex-priest and whatever Tomas is are the best that they could get.

“See, we have folks come up this way all the time,” Sister Margaret says as she pours them coffee in mugs with a peeling logo of the local radio station. “There’s always been talk about murders in the forest, hauntings in caves, your mystic ritual sacrifice what have you. The woods are big enough for some of ‘em to be at least halfway true; people get lost down holes or wander ‘til they starve and that sounds like reason enough to haunt for me. Most in town don’t give a shit ‘bout the tourists as long as they keep to themselves. But last summer…” She frowns, and Marcus is reminded of nothing less than a bulldog playing dress-up. Hers is not a face that screams nun. “We had some young folk stay in the county for a few weeks, camping and such. Kids in town are always lookin’ for somethin’ dumb to do, partying out in the woods ‘til dawn before heading in to work or school. It was the animals first. We didn’t notice anythin’ wrong with Joey ‘til later.” The way the light hits her face makes it almost seem like she’s crying. “Much later.”

He knows it’s not going to be good long before Margaret leads them to the house, car rocking unsteadily over the uneven dirt road, making unease string his muscles tense and wary. When he and Tomas climb out of the car, the air hangs fetid, corpserot heavy, and Tomas wretches, wet fall of coffee and stomach acid.

The exorcism is ugly, if not prolonged, but it ends with the demon cast out, with most of the teeth left in Joey’s head, and his parents shooing them out the front door with lip service thanks as Joey cries and cries, huddled over the still form of the family dog. He’d been eating it when they got there, had grinned up at them lurid and red around sticky fingers, and called Tomas by name. What flowed through Marcus then wasn’t the clean gut-punch of God’s grace, but fury, and he thinks it might be shameful to taint forgiveness and love with anger, thinks it is shameful, thinks of how his father’s love had been so strong he’d caved his mother’s head in with a hammer instead of kissing it better.

Fucking _demons_ , you cast them out but it still feels like they’re worming around in all the bits of your head you’d like to keep buried under leaf and loam to rot. Margaret gives them both a pat on the back, and Tomas stifles a laugh beneath his hand when it sends Marcus reeling back a step. He grimaces when his fingers get too close to his nose; long enough in the game and he’ll know well enough to not try to smell shit until he’s had a very thorough shower. There’s a bag with sandwiches, thick cut bread and wrapped in wax paper, grapes, apples, a thermos. It’s the closest thing to genuine gratitude they’ll get here, and it’s much kinder than some. He nods, and Tomas says something polite but short, and they leave. They weren't wanted here in the first place. They certainly aren't wanted here now.

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, he feels just _good_ , a pleasure without any pain attached. Nothing like lancing a boil with its initial ache of pressure before the brightstinglance, the soreness that lingers and bruises after. Not like the cool of ice pressed against a shiner and the relief that spreads outwards with the unsteady drip of cold water down your shirt, the rake of fingernails down your arm. Just. Uncomplicated good. It’s hard to be unsuspicious of it.

They eat the sandwiches on the roof of the car until Marcus can no longer stop snivelling and his ass is freezing and Tomas is breathless, teeth chattering in the wind that whips at their too-thin jackets, the night sky yawning wide and open overhead as they fumble at the car doors with numb fingers that burn against cold steel, duck inside like children sneaking in after curfew.

“Is it always like this?” Tomas asks in hushed tones, despite he and Marcus being the only people for miles, alone in a car with darkness draped over them as dark and heavy as a childhood blanket. It feels intimate, like a secret, and it makes Marcus antsy and it makes him shift closer as if to hear, or maybe to make sure that he’s the only one that receives these quiet sweet things dropped from Tomas’ tongue like clear cool water.

It’s never like this. He wants to say. When I was younger it used to be, and that I thought it was God’s love and approval overflowing, spilling through me after I’d been a vessel for his will, to heal whatever damage the battle had wrought on me. He wants to say maybe someday, if Tomas is lucky enough to live long enough to become old and tired that he might explain this away, a rush of endorphins after danger, a chemical high designed by his flesh and not a gift given by God. He wants to say Tomas, you and I are mirrors, and that maybe this is God’s love after all, glancing between them whenever they face each other. He wants to let go of the laughsob that's been trying to work its way out for hours, _days_ now, to talk about how supremely deeply fucked up it is that they can feel this way when a hundred miles east of here, there is a family still grieving, a boy still weeping, a dog that will have to be buried come morning but for now has been tucked into the freezer in a Ziploc bag. He wants to talk about the way his hand has settled in the dip of Tomas’ shoulder again without permission, the way he hasn’t shrugged it off or given Marcus a quelling glare like Bennett might have. He wants to talk about the clean starched edge of his collar pressing into his palm, and how he wants his hand to curl around the back, fiddle at the catch until it comes free and how Tomas will still keeping looking at him as his own hands reach up and pull it off so Marcus can press his hand against the skin there. How Tomas might hiss at his cold fingers, press his teeth into the give of his lower lip, a flash of white in the dark. How long it might take for them to warm up there.

Instead, he shakes Tomas, jovially, so very buddy buddy, and grins a grin his ma had once described as puckish before slapping it from his face.  “Let’s find out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys are enjoying this deeply mortifying journey as much as I am. I'm pretty fresh and new 2 the fanfiction game, so I would deeply love, appreciate, and blush over some concrit if you loved/hated/felt blasé about this latest priest experience


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are developments, and dreams, and Tomas finally takes a goddamn shower.

Marcus has never worried about Bennett.

Marcus has and will continue to refer to Bennett as a cockroach to his face, but he thinks there’s probably something a bit more mythic to it- a folk hero or demi-god that also happens to look like he does taxes and presses clothes for fun, and stonily turns down the traditional outfit of loincloth or what have you for fustily buttoned clothes that cover him from neck to ankles. He would never say anything so complementary to his face, of course, he’d hate to give him a big head and ruin the current arch of his cheekbones, but if Marcus is somehow unlucky enough to be alive when Bennett is dead, he’ll make sure to leave appropriate offerings at his headstone, myrrh and mana and wine.

Maybe if he was a more poetic man, he’d write a passage about Bennett in that hell hole in Chicago, sluggishly bleeding from the temple and the mouth and the wrists, a misplaced stigmata on one of God’s truest servants. Instead, he sketches it on a particularly beautiful page in Mark and tucks the thought away safe, so that next time he rags on Bennett or gives him another unadmitted ulcer, he feels no guilt or shame.

So it's not worry Marcus feels when Bennett calls two months into Tomas’ novitiate, voice calm and clipped as he tells Marcus to trash the burner and get even further off the grid, if possible. That the Vatican knows that Tomas is following him around like God’s saddest orphaned puppy, and that they are very not pleased with the whole situation. That the corruption has spread much, much higher than they feared.

“How will I reach you?” He hears himself say through the static roaring in his ears.

“You won’t.” Bennett says, and the call ends before Marcus can mutter a blessing or a snide comment about Bennett watching too many spy films. His mouth is dry as he unsnaps the back of the mobile and tosses the SIM and the battery out the window of the car.

Tomas looks over from the driver’s seat, face etched in agony and shadow like bloody St. Sebastian over a phone call. “Is everything alright?”

Marcus nods, swallows in rapid succession to make his tongue work. “Bennett’s taking a bit of a leave. Nothing to concern yourself about.”

Tomas is silent for a minute, eyes glued to the road. He reaches out, unseeing, and his palm lands on the meat of Marcus’ thigh. “Are you alright?”

No, Marcus isn’t alright. He’s a lonely old man whose pulse is racing for very different reasons than a moment ago, whose thoughts have turned to dust easily scattered when Bennett is not _alright,_  just because Tomas laid hands on him.

“Dandy.” he says, instead of letting air hiss through his teeth as he spread his legs further, making Tomas’ hand inch higher, higher. He clears his throat and pats Tomas’ hand before depositing it back on his side of the car. “We’ll just have to find work other ways.”

Tomas shrugs, and smiles over at him, mouth curved crookedly. He hasn’t shaved in a week, his eyes are bruised purple from sleeplessness, and his hair can’t hold a curl because of the grease. He looks terrible. Marcus wants to crawl inside him, to shove his way past the pride and vanity that fester inside Tomas’ heart, and make his own sinful home there. “God will provide.”

 

* * *

 

Tomas dreams.

He is just _there_ , brutal and sudden, sleep clothes sodden with sweat, the long hem of his pants catching dust and straw. There is someone screaming. It echoes weirdly, like Tomas is in a closet instead of the large patchy barn that surrounds him. He walks, straw snapping beneath his bare feet and releasing the smell of harvest as he goes. The barn goes on for miles. Somewhere far away, he can hear muttering. Pages rustling. The thrash of metal against metal. He walks, straw snapping beneath his bare feet, releasing screams with every step. The barn goes on forever. He knows someone else is here. He knows he is needed. The barn goes on forever. He blinks, and he is up among the rafters. He looks down, and sees Tomas, sweaty, barefoot, in his sleep clothes. His eyes are glazed over white as he steadily steps in place, an unending march. He stand of a piles of crows’ wings and crickets that snap beneath his feet. Somewhere in the barn, he can hear someone screaming. Somewhere in the barn, he can hear someone calling.

- _tomas-_

It is very far away.

- _for chrissake you stupid bastard-_

Tomas raises his head, unseeing eyes tilted up towards him. He knows that Tomas can see him. He is afraid.

_-you need to wake up tomas. can you hear my voice?-_

Tomas opens his mouth as if it was on a hinge, and the voice booms out like a loudspeaker.

_-Follow it back Tomas, follow me back-_

When did he get here?

 _-_ _Lord, we ask for a mighty downpour from Heaven, may your sons and daughters hear your voice-_

Below him, Tomas’ throat begins to move like a mother’s stomach, quick shapes moving under skin. He can see right down to Tomas’ uvula, and from behind it, crickets begin to froth out of his mouth like a plague. The voice plays on uninterrupted.

_-go as you bid us to go, serve as you inspire us to serve-_

There is something dripping on his face from above, uneven, sporadic, saline. His feet are now covered in insects, and the sounds of their legs hopping and scratching, multitudinous, is the cry of angels. He looks back down at Tomas whose mouth is still agape. There is a fresh red handprint on his cheek, and he feels its mirror burn against his own.

 _-_ wake up-

Tomas is awake and there is the blur of too much stimuli too fast. For a moment, he thinks it is another night interrupted by sleep paralysis, ghosts sitting on his chest. Then his brain catches up. It is Marcus, and his face is red and strained from shouting, one hand curved around Tomas’ stinging cheek and another fisted in the sweat soaked front of his shirt. Tomas wonders how Marcus is so wondrously heavy when his shirts hang as loosely from the shoulders as they do.

It takes longer for sound to make sense again. English always sounds like cotton candy after waking or after an endless night, wispy and ephemeral. When sound makes sense again, he realizes that the rapid movement of Marcus’ lips had actually been the rolling patter of Spanish prayer, and he couldn’t understand. That is much, much more horrifying than the dream.

“You were crying.” Tomas says, and even to his ears, it sounds like his voice got stuck in a blender.

“You were screaming as your eyes rolled over white so, yeah, might have got a bit concerned there.”  Marcus says. His voice is still trembling. “Kept me from my beauty sleep.”

“God knows you need it.” Tomas teases, but it falls flat in the now oppressive dark. He reaches over to flick on the bedside lamp, but he cannot with Marcus on him. The movement seems to wake Marcus from his own reverie, because suddenly he is perched back on his own bed, still among the disturbed sheets. Tomas shivers in the sudden dearth of warmth at his side, chilled to the bone. He wishes he had the words to ask him back, in a way that would not make Marcus uncomfortable or wary. He wishes that his whole body did not communicate what his mouth cannot, that it yearns for Marcus’ heat and weight at his side. So often he seems like a half feral cat that Tomas fears he will scare away. Rangy in the way of the long underfed, doesn’t know what to do with softness in others, finds it suspicious eight times out of ten. Fond of yowling.

So often he has found that the dark allows for words too fragile to let loose in the light. It is not the case now. Any words he might have had have been notched into his ribcage, the blades perpendicular as they bite into his flesh with every inhale and exhale. He wants Marcus to say something awful so he can snap back at him until their petty bickering breaks whatever holds them in silence now. The room isn’t huge, but the two feet between their beds feels like a canyon, insurmountable.

Marcus is chewing on the inside of his cheek, and he hasn’t looked away from Tomas. He flushes. Usually he has the decency to not let his mind wander when both he and Marcus are awake, but tonight seems to be full of exceptions.

“Has that happened before?” Marcus says finally.

Tomas shrugs.

“You can’t just-“ and Marcus is viper mad, tendons stark in his neck as he quickly turns red “- you can’t just not _know_ Tomas. Whatever the hell that was seems to be pretty memorable to me.”

“The interesting thing about being asleep,” Tomas manages to say, and it creaks, and for a horrible long second he’s worried any words will be lost to the outpouring of crickets, “is that you are unconscious to the outside world .”

He sneers. “This isn’t the time to get shirty, Tomas.”

He finds himself  getting irritated, and it is such a blessed relief to the numb of fear. “I don’t know why you do that. Do you think saying my name so often is a spell and I will spill every secret unthought thing to you? If I say I do not know, it means I do not know.”

Marcus looks like he’s raring for a fight, opens his lips to let loose a string of quiet stinging vitriol, and stops, mouth open, tongue pressed against his teeth.

“It was a vision, wasn’t it.”

Tomas shakes his head, pulls his knees up close to his chest, sheets pulled tight. “I haven’t. I don’t.” He looks over at Marcus, hopes he can read the plea that every limb is singing, that he’ll fill in the blanks.

“You don’t know.” Tomas nods. “Have you had any visions, don’t _flinch_ Tomas, you’re the one with prophetic dreams, have there been any visions since Chicago?”

His no comes out as a question and Marcus rolls his eyes. “Have you had any bloody dreams that came true? Dreamt of any other handsome men that you’ve latched onto like a leech?”

Tomas flushes all the way down to his chest and hopes it cannot be seen in the dim aura of light peeking under the lampshade. He didn’t think he was quite so, so _obvious_. He didn’t think this was a talk they would need to have.

“No. God sent me you, I mean, to you. Since then-“ he shrugs one shoulder, noncommittal, “- just regular dreams.” He feels his stomach flip over in guilt at the half-lie, but Marcus doesn’t, shouldn’t know of what he dreams about these days. It would be easier if all his dreams were of pain and crickets and fresh shorn straw.

They are silent again for a time that stretches, endless, Marcus fidgeting, eyes affixed to the ugly print framed on the wall across from him. In the dark, without his glasses, it is nicer to look at than in the light. When they had first checked in and flipped on all the lights to do a cursory scan of the room, it was visually assaulting, blobs of colour grotesquely bright, never coalescing into an image he understood. Tomas sits among the sheets he had soiled long enough that he has begun to dry, and he cannot sit among the filth any longer, tacky, fear-sour. If Marcus is going to ask him to leave, Tomas will face it fully dressed and physically, if not spiritually, clean.

“I’m going to shower,” he says, rising from the bed like an old man, muscles screaming like he’d spent the day building houses, not reclined in the passenger seat of the car listening to Marcus hum along to Glen Miller, cheeks and nose red in the arid reflection of fresh fallen snow. Marcus makes a noncommittal grunt as he passes, eyes flickering briefly from the painting to him as he passes on heavy feet.

Motel bathroom lights are universally unflattering, but Tomas thinks he’d look awful regardless. He takes a moment to look at the waxy sheen of his skin, the sunken red of his eyes, the slump of his shoulders, and looks away. There is a thought about pride and falling that he does not want to coalesce, so he jerks at the shower handle until it’s turned all the way, steps out of his clothes into the cold spatter of water, stands there as it goes from freezing to tepid to boiling. When the heat is too much, he commands a tired hand to turn the temperature down and reaches for the bottle of body wash that sits suspiciously empty. Marcus had teased him about it, the first night, Tomas unpacking giddily like a kid at a sleepover, but since then, the complimentary soaps had remained ostentatiously in their wrapped paper packages, and sometimes, if Tomas is very lucky, Marcus will turn in a way that allows him to breathe in the smell of his soap on another’s skin, transmuted into something wonderful and strange when mixed with the scent of worn leather, the occasional haze of smoke. If he was not cowardly, selfish, he would have teased Marcus about his indulgences, and Marcus would’ve turned red to the tips of his ears as he grumbled, and in every place they stopped Tomas would’ve seen soap wrapping deposited neatly in the garbage, the chalky deposit it would leave on Marcus’ skin.

Even then, something had turned curiously in his stomach, rebelled at the thought, taken simple pleasure in the idea of a necessity shared. So he had said nothing. He will continue to say nothing, and curse himself privately when his stomach flips over in ways that demean Marcus and his friendship.

He soaps up the washcloth and rubs himself down quickly despite the rough drag of it before cleaning his hair, scrubbing down to the scalp as if the oil there could hold on to the horror of the hours before. If this is the last straw, he’s not going to wait around for it. He balls up his sweaty clothes under one arm and wraps a towel around his waist. Takes a deep breath. Wrenches open the door.

It releases a wave of steam into the room, and Marcus looks up from where he’d been sketching, before his eyes skitter back to the page, charcoal gripped too tight. Tomas swallows around the apprehension that’s gripped him tight, shoulders taught, sweating cold and furiously already. He tries to walk naturally over to his bag, searching for underwear, socks, clothes that will feel and not look like armor. He doesn’t need Marcus thinking he’s more pathetic than he already is. Doesn’t think he could stand it.

He stands in front of Marcus, who hasn’t looked up since he came back in the room. He’s still sketching, but Tomas cannot make sense of the strokes of it from this angle, this height. He purposefully loosens his fists so that his hands lay flat by his sides, and clears his throat pointedly.

“D’you need something?” Marcus says, head still tucked towards paper.

“So?” Tomas says.

“So what?”

“So do I have to go?” That’s enough for Marcus’ hands to still, but he doesn’t look up.

“Had enough of it, have you? It’s a pity you couldn’t make it a year, but not everyone’s cut out for it.”

Tomas grits his teeth. “I have not had enough of it. Have you had enough of it?” Swallows around the obscene desire to cry. “Of me?”

Marcus looks up, eyes wide. “What? No. You’re a far better roommate, than, than Bennett for chrissake. It’s horrifying seeing him lower himself into a coffin every night. Once found him hanging from the shower rod.”

“You don’t want me to go?” Tomas says, deflating. “I thought that you would-”

“- no, no we all have our peccadillos, you can stay.” Marcus stands up in a rush, cupping his hands around Tomas’ arms, and Tomas needs to firmly remind himself that Marcus is not Jessica, that it does not mean what he wants it to mean. “Be a bit silly for me to kick you out for having premonitions or whatever,” he says, ignoring Tomas’ snort at the word ‘premonition.’ “It’s not something in your control. I’m not Irish enough to blame you for that.”

“Good,” Tomas says, and his smile is not forced. “You are Irish enough already.”

The hand that had been gently running up and down the length of his deltoid slaps him jovially and does nothing at all to quell the butterflies erupting in his stomach. “Oi,” Marcus says, but it’s not much of a beratement with his voice so soft. “Now go back to bed. We can’t have two ugly buggers going around saying they’re exorcists, it’d ruin our credibility. And I’m too old to start being the pretty one.”

He’s not Jessica, Tomas firmly reminds himself, as he replies with something pithy and walks the two feet back to his own bed, shifts to the side that he had not slept on, and tries to make his heartbeat slow as Marcus turns off the light and settles into sleep. He breathes deeply, and does not think at all about crawling into Marcus’ bed, smelling soap and smoke and him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > be me  
> > write fic for the first time in two years SPECIFICALLY to write about tomas having and reacting to steamy demon visions  
> > realizes there needs to be a """""plot"""""" or whatever to get there  
> > suffers


	4. Chapter 4

Tomas has never been anything but physical.

For as long as he remembers, as long as he’s been able to distinguish from the other and the self, his body and his mind, he’s never been able to separate the nebulous sense of _Tomas_ that hangs behind his eyes from blood and flesh. He remembers the rapid machine-gun rattle of his parents arguing flooding his ears and how his heart rate rabbeted in response. The first time the plane touched down in Mexico and the solid dry heat that enveloped him and pressed him down, made him feel even smaller, whip thin, a brittle branch that pressed himself against Abuela’s full skirts as if to hide there.

More recently, the heady smoke of frankincense, the bite of vinegar and the soft give of bread and meat beneath his teeth as he eats a Maxwell Street Polish. The press of his lips against Jessica’s cunt, jaw aching as he tried to press deeper and deeper, chin slick, scalp aching as she pulls on his hair again, again, and comes quick and sweet under his tongue. The slow dissolution of Eucharist as he swallows, body and blood.The press of his lips against the soft swell of Casey’s hip, the terrible fear sweat that permeated the room, the rancour of vomit, the demon’s crooked laugh through Casey’s rotting teeth, Marcus’ hand an iron brand on his shoulder as he throws Tomas away. These events replay visceral and physical in the few silent moments where he does not need to hide from Marcus’ prying eyes. His body remembers, and does not care for ethics or his shame.

The forgetting isn’t coming easy for him. It doesn’t seem like the forgetting will come at all.

It hurts, that his weakness has taken Jessica’s body and her laugh and the scent of her and woven it in knots with his assault on Casey, the demon’s assault on him. It’s not something he thinks he can ask forgiveness for.

(Sometimes. He imagines confession, with Marcus a warm and solid presence, head tilted towards the privacy screen between them, and the absolution that runs like honey from his tongue, that warms Tomas from his core out. He tries not to. Tried. Is trying.)

So the point is. The point, if Tomas had one at all in his long, long line of pretending towards humility and holiness and godly things, is that he knows he is weak. Knows that his flesh craves so resolutely that he spent years writing love letters to a woman he had never even kissed, let alone fucked. Knows that the demon in Casey Rance saw his weakness flaring like a storey-tall neon sign blinking his weakness in morse and pulled him in under a minute with the temptation of Jessica’s heat and scent.

Knows that he keeps thinking about Marcus’ hands on his throat, his wrists.

Tomas had promised himself  after Casey, after Jessica, _never again_ , with the good intentions of an addict newly clean. That he had seen the misery and trouble he caused by thinking with his skin. That his collar was a pressed reminder of the promise he made to himself and to God, to never again.

He doesn’t know exactly how many weeks it took for Marcus’ constant casual touch to send warmth crawling through his belly, sitting there heavy and squirming until he took himself in hand in the lukewarm drizzle of a shitty motel shower, resolutely thinking of no one and nothing in particular but a hand gripping his arm tight.

After, when he is panting, and ashamed, and directing the weak pulse of the showerhead where his come splattered against the grotty tile, he promises. Never again.

He promises.

 

* * *

 

The unfortunate thing is, of course, is that Tomas is weak and a fucking liar, and he cannot stop cataloguing each and every wondrous way he and Marcus touch. Isn’t even sure if it’s worth berating himself anymore, when it fills his gut with queasy teenage butterflies, when his heart is so full of joy he worries it might burst. When he thinks, sometimes, maybe, maybe, as Marcus spots him from across the room and smiles, as Marcus flicks sugar packets and creamers at him from across the table, as Marcus fills every nook and cranny of Tomas’ mind.

Tomas isn’t able to stop himself these days, anyway, and is trying to at least admit in the privacy of his own head that he’s fucked up, in hopes that it keeps his traitorous body from fucking up in a similar manner.

So he brings breakfast sandwiches that are greasy to the touch into their room, and thinks the pleasure that rakes down his cheeks all the way to his stomach when Marcus says “good man” isn’t completely inappropriate, is a pleasure he might feel when being kind to any friend. He’s distracted by the way an elegant hand attached to an elegant wrist and forearm worms out from underneath a thin coverlet, waving this way and that waiting for Tomas to gently place coffee in it. That hand is a hand he wants on his throat. As he’s staring, the cup wobbles and coffee belches out of the tiny hole in the plastic lid and lands on that wrist, and it blotches red immediately as Marcus lets out a hiss and his arm recoils like a snake to a cave. A moment later, his head emerges, grumpy and tousled and with several fabric lines worn into his cheek. There’s sleep crusted in the corner of his eyes, and Tomas wants so much to crawl in there with him that he forgets that breath is necessary for man to live. How could he remember that when - this?

It takes a moment and Marcus repeating himself (once? twice?) for Tomas to break himself from thoughts he cannot allow to take form in the sunlight. He had once promised himself that he would never think of Marcus as anything but a mentor, a brother, while he was near, but that had eroded, crumbling shale and dust in the force of Tomas’ want, his weakness. Before that, he had promised to not think of Marcus as a man at all. Before that, he promised to not be so weak, so prey to his own flesh. Tomas’ promises mean as little as a promise possibly could. He’s trying. He needs to try harder.

“Sorry, what was that?” The words sound uneven, the intonation off. They are the dizzy tilt of the word _wonky_ , that Tomas had to let jumble around his mouth after Marcus cursed at the uneven bunny ears of motel cable, trying to catch the signal for the last minutes of a made-for-tv western.

“I said,” Marcus says, sucking the drops of coffee from the sharp bone of his wrist, sucking the damp from Tomas’ mouth and throat, “that your table service could use a little work.”

“Maybe if you could bother sitting upright before coffee this wouldn’t be a problem,” he snipes back, falling into the smooth rut of habit. He doesn’t admit that seeing Marcus soft and unguarded in bed is both a holy blessing and a curse. Early on, in Tomas’ apartment, in the first awkward weeks on the road, he could’ve counted the times he saw Marcus asleep on one hand and had room left over. He was awake when Tomas slept, face craggy with shadow as he flipped through his bible, a sketchbook, a map, day clothes wrinkled and boots tied tight. Awake when Tomas woke, seated somewhere else in the room, flipping through cable on mute or a quarter paperback they picked up on their way into town, an impulse stop at a rummage sale. Eventually, they’d end up reading the same books from the box they had tucked safely in the backseat, and Tomas would come slowly back to the world, eyelids blinking heavy and slow, thoughts wispy as those thin strips of cloud, wondering if Marcus was at the point with the rakish duke, or if he was really reading about the migratory pattern of ducks or if he was sleeping with his eyes open.

He also doesn’t say anything about the track bottoms that flash grey between white sheets as Marcus shuffles to press his back against the headboard, that Tomas had bought used and worn soft, that Tomas had folded into Marcus’ backpack without comment after seeing him to go bed in a (once, long-ago) starched shirt and trousers. One day, they had made their way into the rotation of clothes Marcus wore to bed similarly without comment, and Tomas tried to keep the bright bloom of joy that threatened to break his breast from the inside out appropriately hidden. Marcus got tetchy when he felt given undue kindness.

He hands Marcus a paper bag that is translucent with grease in spots, and Marcus makes an indecent noise. Tomas focuses on the feel of his own breakfast in his hands, its warm heft, the biscuit flaking at mere touch. He bites into it, and egg and cheese burn his tongue, and he is so happy in that moment that he thinks he might choke on it.

The day started foggy and seems inclined to stay that way. The mist is cool and dense and a little oppressive when paired with a grey sky, but Marcus seems to like it, shrugging on a grey sweatshirt that Tomas is 80% sure he got from a prison lost and found and is 100%  sure it’s the article of clothing responsible for making his washing machine smell like dirty river water. Drizzle anoints him with microscopic drops of water being cast like aspersion. They shuffle into the car, slamming doors of cold iron, and Tomas’ teeth chatter while Marcus flicks through his tapes, settling on something acoustic that makes the car feel warmer, cozier, like they were meant to be inside looking out.

It’s been days since Tomas could feel normal, like Marcus wasn’t watching out the corner of his eye for Tomas to roll into trance gracelessly, foaming at the mouth as pupil and iris were traded for sclera, unsettling white. Some days the endless driving is nothing but tedium, Tomas’ body screaming at him to move while his ass goes numb in his seat, endless cornfield and tarmac and derelict towns rotting to wormwood, the ceaseless glare of sun against the windshield. Today is a day that he wishes could go on forever.

Tomas has been entrenched in Catholicism before he could speak. He’s not sure how he could still have the optimism to think that good things can last. Why he thinks he could deserve it.

They’ve driven past the town limits of, unbelievably, Mount Tabor, when he begins to shake. A minute later, while he is seizing in the passenger seat blind to the present, while he cannot hear Marcus shifting in his seat, noticing, slamming on the brakes as he shouts himself hoarse, they pass a barn that Tomas would’ve recognized, if he had eyes to see.

* * *

 

If not for the random muscle spasms that kept Tomas twitching Marcus would think him dead. Nothing will wake him, not the sting of Marcus’ hand slapped open palmed against his cheek, nor the jolt of the car’s left wheel dipping into a pothole large enough to make the suspension rattle, not the call of his name.

Not prayer.

If there was a worse time for God to decide Marcus was an unworthy conduit for His will, it cannot be fathomed. Even if Marcus was too broken or too worn down or too, too _used_ , he cannot make sense of God abandoning Tomas, in whom He shines bright enough to hurt. Although, maybe Marcus has never fucking understood God, not when he was twelve and thought he’d finally found his fucking use, or months ago when he heard Him as he cradled Casey Rance to his chest and wept at the joy of His voice, of the weak rhythmic pulse of Casey’s heart. Maybe if Marcus had the gall to understand that he’s a tool and nothing more since the beginning, he wouldn’t be shocked now.

It is an uncharitable thought and a stupidly selfish thought, but Marcus isn’t feeling particularly giving right now. God, if he is listening, does not answer in a way that Marcus can understand. So he drives, and tries to keep his eyes more on the road than on Tomas, and mutters Hail Marys in an endless loop.

He’s so stupidly caught up in his anger and fear that he doesn’t notice that something is… off. Tomas begins to pant heavily in the front seat beside him, snatches of cut-off words making their way through his laboured inhales as the rain abruptly stops. It is silent. Outside, there is no wind roaring against the truck as it speeds down the highway, a sound so pervasive that it is quelling in its absence. He cannot hear the whir of the tape in the player. The sky is a solid block of grey, and if it wasn’t for the trees whipping by inconsistent as Marcus presses down on the gas, he might think he’d been stuck in some loop of his own mind.

He doesn’t panic. He doesn’t have the luxury of panic. Tomas’ eyes move rapidly, as if in sleep. Marcus hears a garbled sentence in Aramaic. Tomas doesn’t speak Aramaic.

He drives.

As the engine turns and grey smoke belches from the exhaust, houses and strip malls and diners begin to dot the landscape. In the distance, a steeple stands lonely against the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> while this will have no bearing on u the reader for approximately one hundred years, please note that today I had to genuinely reflect on whether "dick" or "cock" was the best word for a certain sentence. lord.
> 
> feel free 2 drop me a line if you enjoyed these 2000 some words of navel gazing


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Augury, the reading of entrails, and a locked door that is opened.

His world has narrowed to the loop of yellow paint on tarmac, the slowly rising town on the horizon, and the aborted twitches and laboured sounds that spill from Tomas’ mouth.

He can’t think about whether or not Tomas will be fine. About what would’ve become of them if he’d let Tomas drive this morning- it was his turn, but the sepia shadows beneath his eyes were too dark so Marcus’d said, no, no. Felt warm when Tomas smiled in return.

The world remains still and silent outside, as unnatural as if time had stopped. Maybe Marcus is sleeping too. He speeds past the clinic and keeps his eye on the steeple, best-guessing what turns. Small towns only have so many streets, but he can’t help the panic that tells him that time is running out.

He reaches out blindly to fumble for Tomas’ wrist, where he can feel the steady trip of blood flowing, of Tomas’ body keeping the lights on while he’s out of the house. Its speed speaks to anxiety or fear. Tomas can deal with those things. He’s of sterner make than Marcus, despite his failings. Tomas will be fine. If Marcus drives and gets Tomas to the church and keeps a hand gripped tight around him, Tomas will be fine. He’ll find his way back and they’ll deal with the awful stillness of the world outside, and Marcus will be able to breath again.

 

* * *

 

Tomas is standing in the middle of a church basement. This is an irrefutable truth, despite there being many things that would usually not belong, like a crowd of people whispering urgently to each other, too many of them with fingers restless near triggers of shotguns and rifles and pistols, the bread and butter firearms of rural America.

“We can’t let them in.” Hisses one woman who has a violent sunrise of a bruise marring her eye, her cheek. There is a child behind her, their face pressed against her leg as if it would narrow the world down to just her, and Tomas hurts for a moment, thinking of his grandmother. Tomas can hear banging. Something being hit so hard that the floorboards shudder, shaking dust onto their hair. Someone is yelling, and it’s horrible to hear. It makes Tomas want to press his hands against his ears, but his hands are shaking too much to raise above the elbow.

“It could be someone who needs sanctuary.” says another woman who looks too much like Chris MacNeil for Tomas’ comfort. Her voice begins to fade away, mouth moving as if she still speaks, but all Tomas can hear is the slow crescendo of music, something with strings and woodwinds that would seem at home in a concert hall Another truth: he needs to find from where the music comes, the perfect throbbing swell of it.

He blinks, and he is at the top of a set of wooden stairs. Outside, it is grey, but the stained-glass window is still brightly illuminated. He turns the light over in his palm, jeweled red and purple and blue. Absently, he wipes the corner of his face against his shoulder from where he has drooled. The light is beautiful. He can hear music. Behind him, he knows there is a wave of crickets, rising up before it crashes over him and pulls him under, their bristled legs scratching his skin, struggling to hop out of his mouth as they sing, and sing, their eyes black and frantic as they scrabble for purchase. Tomas deserves better than that. It’s true. He knows it. The music promises something better. It’s there, outside the window. All he needs to do is jump.

The whir of insects grows louder behind him as he leaps. The glass cuts at him as he falls and he has never felt anything better. He presses a palm to his cheek and weeps at the joy of the jagged edge that is caught there, that has sliced down quick to the bone. There is an illicit thrill to running his fingers over the smooth white jut of his jawbone, and wonders why no one else has done it, why he’s been told all these years to fear sharp cutting things.

He has been falling a long time. The music is very loud. If he presses gentle fingers to his ears he is unable to distinguish the blood from his face from the blood he finds there. He can no longer hear the crickets’ frantic calls, and it is relief.

The light turns to shadow, not in a fade but like nightfall. Slow and then sudden.

Auntie is standing with her back to him, curled over an industrial steel counter like you might see in a professional kitchen. The wet sound of raw meat, squelching beneath her hands as she kneads it, shoulders and elbows moving in long sinuous rolls that do not end, that only introduce the next push and pull of muscle and bone.

“You’re late.” She says, and does not pause in her efforts.

“I’m sorry.” Tomas says. There is a black lamb in his arms and it struggles. “I needed to find this.” The whites of its eyes roll as it bleats in panic, cloven hooves kicking wildly. The pain is dull, except for when it catches just right and slices, skin splitting from skin. His blood falls ponderously, and it takes him a moment to realize it isn’t blood at all, but poppies.

Auntie tsks impatiently. “Well, come on then, we don’t have all day. When I was apprenticing, I never did any dilly-dallying. Auntie would’ve ground my bones for bread and stock thickener if I’d dawdled like you.”

“I’m sorry Auntie.” The lamb struggles, its tongue lolling from its mouth as it screams.

“Bring it to the table.” He carries it over, and can see now what Auntie has been working on, a complex knot of entrails that form a labyrinth he could not solve. She takes the lamb, two hooves in each hand, and he cast his eyes to the floor. He’s not allowed to look at Auntie’s face after last time. Tomas is momentarily distracted by the swelling on the top of his hand, where the flow of poppies has been stymied in the gash the lamb left. He digs his fingers in and pries out a handful of wet petals and stems before they begin to drip all by themselves again.

Auntie grabs a butcher’s knife with her six fingered hand and holds it out to Tomas, blade first. “Chop chop,” she says, blank faced. Tomas can’t remember who, but he thinks they would’ve laughed. He takes the knife. The panic leaves the lamb with a dull chop. Its body flails for a moment, and from its neck it spills crickets that Auntie pinches between her fingers before crunching them noisily between her teeth. “Pests.” She gnashes, and Tomas can see the bristles of a leg stuck between bone and gum. “Nothing but pests.” She waits for a moment before hitting him across the ribs with the blunt of the knife, a dull meaty thwack. “Well? Get on with it.”

Tomas’ sleeves are rolled up. He doesn’t remember when he did that. Grasping the neck with one hand, he plunges his hand down the esophagus, and pulls, and pulls. Organs spill out, a swollen tapeworm about to snap. He throws them on the table, and Auntie, still crunching, peers over them to see where they lay across the labyrinth.

Tomas wipes his hand against his pants. “What does it mean?”

Auntie makes a considering noise. “Nothing good. Should’ve known you were more trouble than you’re worth.”

Tomas’ gut twists and pull like someone’s reached down and grabbed him like the lamb. “Auntie, no.”

She sniffs. “You beg and beg to be my apprentice but give me nothing but grief.”

“Please, Auntie.”

Auntie turns and looks him dead in the eye. Her gaze is viperous. She is beautiful, and terrible. “Tell me that you want it.” She presses a six fingered hand to his face and his skin crawls. He’s not allowed to look at her, but isn’t allowed to look away. “Tell me that you want me.” A whine escapes him and her grip tightens.

“I do, Auntie, I do. Please.” Tomas begs. “Tell me what it says.”

She digs her nails into his cheek and he revels in it. “He’s coming. And you’re going to need me.”

 

* * *

 

If Marcus needed a sign that something was wrong, the chained and bolted church doors gave him a pretty fucking good indication.

“Please!” He howls, pounding his flattened palm against the door until it’s stinging red. “I need medical aid. My friend is sick. Please let me in.”

There is the sound of a kerfuffle inside, and muted arguing, before he hears someone shout “Fuck off monster!”

“Aaron.” Someone else hisses. “Katrina said not to engage.”

“Katrina can bite me.” Aaron retorts. “We’ve been holed up in here for ages and nothing’s getting better.

He slams his hand against the door again. Tries to quell the temper that’s rising tempest-like from his fucking bones, the worst and only legacy of his father. “I don’t know what’s going on in your town but chances are we can help. I can help a lot more if I…” He trails off as he glances down at where he’s leaned against Tomas against the wall, and his tongue works uselessly as he tries to process what he’s seeing. The slow parting of Tomas’ flesh from bone, a slice across his cheek that’s almost coy. He thinks he sees a flash of tooth.

There’s a ringing in Marcus’ ears. Distantly, he’s aware that he is weeping and that pleas spill from his mouth to God, to anyone that will listen. The voices behind the door yell startled, and he can hear the clunk of the blots being undone but Marcus is preoccupied with pressing a hand against Tomas’ cheek like he has before, unlike he has before.

 

* * *

 

When Tomas wakes, he smiles beatifically, like a saint in blissful agony. “Marcus,” he breathes, and there is a slur to it, his pupils blown black. “Marcus. I had the most wonderful dream.” His hand tightens around Marcus’, from where Marcus had clasped and meant to break before Tomas was conscious.  Tomas threads their fingers together, and it would be a joyous intimacy if not for the suspicious townsfolk that cluster in groups, jittery with fear, the fresh stitches hidden under a plaster that covers Tomas’ whole cheek, the drugged quality of his words. Tomas brushes his thumb over Marcus’ knuckles, delicately, like he’s something to be cherished, and smiles. “No. Not a dream. A vision from God.”

Marcus smiles tightly and untangles his hand from Tomas’, tries not to mourn the loss of skin on skin. “Don’t think much anything from God generally includes cutting your face to bits.” Marcus has to watch as Tomas presses a hand to his cheek as if he’s Saint fucking Theresa in ecstasy. It’s what he deserves.

“No.” Tomas grasps at his hand again, desperately, and Marcus cannot pull away a second time. Not like this. Not right now. “Before. In the motel. There’s something wrong here, and she-” he pauses, guilt flashing across his face. “Well. It doesn’t matter. But there’s a demon here, and we can help.”

From behind him is the heavy click of boots on concrete as Katrina walks over, looking ready to kill a man. “Excuse me? Did you just say _demon_?”

It is so unbelievably wrong for Marcus to be doing damage control, it’s like fish flying, or a bull wearing lipstick, or like Tomas has forgotten the easy partnership of give and take they’ve built over the last few months. It isn’t Marcus’ job to be peacekeeper. His is to rattle through people’s drawers and find their secret hidden things, to get under their skin, to muscle his way past someone’s defenses like a bloody blunted battle axe. Tomas is supposed to be the spear. Tomas currently has the faraway gaze of a man stoned out of his mind, and won’t be able to smooth any ruffled feathers with his smile and the urgent fervour of his voice until. Well. Until Marcus fixes this.

(Until God’s voice breaks on this still town filled with frightened people, and tells him what to do with his terror and his guilt, and lets Marcus be filled with him instead, for a little while, anyway.

He cannot abide the call to Bennett, telling him he has broken a precious deadly thing that he left in his care. He cannot abide the thought of Tomas as something broken. He will not abide Tomas becoming anything like him.)

Katrina places her hand warningly by the holster on her belt, and gives them the dead faraway look typical to law enforcement. “I’m mighty curious about how you boys know about what’s going on in town here. I’d be much obliged if you’d tell me how you came to that conclusion.” Loudly unspoken are the words _I have a gun. I have a lot of people that are cowering in a church basement instead of doing their groceries or washing dishes or yelling at each other, and I’m done as hell. Aforementioned gun and you’ll get acquainted real quick if you have shit all to do with this._

Marcus gestures wearily at Tomas’ collar, to himself. “Priest. Exorcist. Weird spooky town. Not much of a jump for us.”

Her hand inches away from the holster, and her expression fades to something a little more human, a lot more worried. “Well. Shit. Guess you’re here just in time, huh?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like blood from a stone y'all.
> 
> I'm posting this because i cannot bear looking at it any longer. Don't be surprised if it is ruthlessly edited someday. maybe. if i can be strong.


	6. Chapter 6

Tomas comes to in a world painted in the broad wide strokes of a watercolour. It is more impression, the whisper of feeling than solid ground beneath his feet, the aura of warmth that radiates three inches out from someone’s skin. He grabs at Marcus greedily, and even that is dull, not the hot guiltlovejoyshame squirm it’d give him at any other time. Even the glint of steel at Katrina’s waist and on her chest in the notion of a star sharp edged does not have much of an impact.

It’s a sluggish climb back to consciousness. He hears Marcus and Katrina speak, heated and gutted by turn, but is irrevocably hooked by the divot between two of Marcus’ knuckles, the path he can trace down a tendon drawn tightly. Every time he traces his way across it like a man pressing over mountain, valley, mountain, there is a new discovery to be made. He is not foolish enough to imagine himself an explorer on virgin territory. He wishes he was awake, _really awake_ , so he could feel this properly. That he could also look at Marcus’ face, the patch of his neck he always seems to miss when he shaves, how he swallows and how the muscles move, the heady smell of him that you need to be close to notice. Marcus is often close. Not for long, a quick pat or clap or clasp before he is gone again . It’s almost worthy to mourn when Marcus hated him, loathed Tomas in a way that was alien and made him balk. Tomas was unaccustomed to hatred. Tomas had put years upon years into being likeable. How odd, that Marcus will move closer to strangers he hates than his brother in God, whom he sleeps by and eats with and with whom he shares breath and pain and complaints about terrible gas station sandwiches that dissolve soggily in their hands, day after day after day.

Marcus’ hand pulls away, and a pathetic noise gets stuck in Tomas’ throat. His eyes track its path as Marcus wipes his palm against his pants, as it makes its way to rest in the crook of Tomas’ neck. Tomas’ eyes shut in relief. How odd, that in English, the word is the same as a shepherd’s crook. How right it is, in that with it Marcus could lead him anywhere. His mind fills quietly with the Word, and for a beautiful moment there is nothing but the cool dry press of Marcus’ hand, psalms running smoothly. _He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake._

“Hey. Tomas. C’mon pet, you need to open your eyes.” Tomas’ eyes flutter open. He hadn’t meant to do that. Marcus’ thumb brushes minutely back and forth underneath his ear. It feels like miles wrought in fire. “You’ve had enough nap time today, I think. No more beauty sleep for you.”

It makes Tomas laugh, which brings in near concert a pain that is crippling. He makes no sound. There is no room left for something as petty as speech.

He comes back again, clearer now, to Marcus wild-eyed and visibly terrified, which is more rattling than his closeness, than his white knuckled grasp on Tomas’ shoulders.

“I’m fine.” He rasps. The words come out clumsily from the ice-burn that is a ravine across his cheek. In its wake, almost an afterthought, is the niggling memory of touching Marcus again and again. “Christ. I’m sorry. I’m awake now.” He shakes Marcus off of him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t myself.” Goes to stand, and almost falls with the world as it drops off suddenly.

Marcus is near again, hovering, not quite touching. “Don’t be stupid. You lost approximately all of your blood from a _psychic vision_. Sit the hell down.”

The woman comes back from where she’d been talking to a cluster of teens that are doing their best to look more annoyed than they are scared, with mixed success. Her hair is the colour of gunmetal, and her gaze cuts Tomas to the quick. He feels flayed in front of her. He guesses he is flayed. He remembers light, and glass cutting him, and vision so real it makes waking feel like dream. He thinks that those soft unhurried moments where he touched Marcus and Marcus did not pull away are moments he did not dream. He thinks that this woman saw him. Sees him, and knows him. He saw her too.

“How’re you feeling son?”

“I’ve been better.” Tomas says, slow and careful of his cheek, and from the huddle of teenagers, he hears one mutter _I thought he was a father_ to groans and a high five so crisp it cuts through the room. Beside him, Marcus snorts. Tomas wants to be laughing with him. The quelling glare from the woman doesn’t seem like she’s pleased with any of them.

“I’m Katrina.” Tomas does not say _I know. I saw you_. in response, and has nothing else. In the silence that gathers, she says, “Your friend brought you in. Says y’all have experience in this sort of matter.”

He shakes his head. “Marcus knows much more than me.”

Marcus hums in acknowledgement beside him, and Tomas doesn’t need to look to know that Marcus has leaned back on the cot, chin tilted and legs crossed akimbo. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to look at him again without flushing in shame.

Katrina’s gaze is unfaltering, and he has to wonder how much use it is in small-town America, when it has the weight and fury of a homicide detective on prime-time TV. “Are you well enough to hear about it?” The _yet_ is unspoken. Tomas needs an hour. Wants a minute. Knows he’s not going to get either, so he rubs tiredly at his eyes (and even that makes his cheek go taut and angry, to send wave over relenting wave of pain through him), squares his shoulders, and stares the problem head on.

“What’s going on here?” Beside him, Marcus doesn’t move from his lounge, but he feels the weight of attention at the back of his head, sharp, searching.

Katrina laughs and passes a hand over her mouth. “Hell if I know. Some think. Well, some _say_ there’s something supernatural going on out there. I don’t know about that, but I do know that we’ve been in here thirty-eight hours and the sun ain’t moved a square inch. Clouds are still. No breeze. No bird song. Nothing. We came in here ‘cause, well.” She sighs. “If I’m going to talk about this bull honky, I need a drink. Any for you, Padres?”

Marcus shakes his head for the both of them, and when Katrina wanders off, he leans closer to Tomas, close enough to whisper, for every hair on his neck to stand on end. “When she comes back,” he says, and he cannot be close enough for Tomas to feel his breath against his ear, it must be imagined, “she’s not going to want to say what she’s seen. What others saw. You’re going to have to pry it out of her.”

Tomas is not brave enough to turn, to see if Marcus is as close as he dreads and wants in equal measure. “Isn’t that your job? You haven’t even let me try since Casey.”

There is the shift of air as Marcus shrugs. “You’re not going to keep me around forever. You need to be able to do this.”

Tomas stands abruptly, and does not fall, despite how his heart struggles to shift blood back to his brain. “I need the bathroom. I’ll be back.” It is not a subtle move, and he cannot shake the thought of every inch of him scourged and bared as Marcus watches him leave.

He finds the bathroom easily, and is struck by how tired he is. Every muscle is salt-water worn. His face hurts like hell. The morning feels decades old. How young he was then, how foolish. To be so powerfully distracted by the sight of grease on Marcus’ fingertips, smeared on his chin. To be caught in the refraction of light in his eyes.

Tomas is too caught up in his own image to notice the flicker of grey dart behind him, and catch on like a thistle.

Later, he’d think it was a piss poor metaphor for his existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have been struggling with this chapter for MONTHS so here's half of it, I'm hoping by flinging it out with the bathwater the second half comes soon. If you're still sticking around, bless you for your patience.


	7. Chapter 7

Tomas turns on the tap, and waits for several moments before water finally runs, clear and cold from its mouth. There is a terrible moment where he can imagine it running the awful red of arterial blood, and it is that that runs down his face, droplets catching on his brow, the downturned corners of his mouth, the grain of his beard. He can envision a clever six fingered hand pressing through the gaps between the buttons of his shirt, blistering hot against his stomach. He blinks, and the vision is gone. The water is just water, rushing to the drain over chipped porcelain. He splashes it against his face, mindful of the bandage on his cheek, which is now dotted red. He fuzzily remembers pressing his hand there, and how he had delighted at the hurt. He remembers much clearer running a finger along the exposed curve of his cheekbone where the roots of his teeth buried themselves, and how sweet was the agony. He shivers, and turns the tap off too hard, making the handle squeak in protest. Even after drying his face with a too-rough paper towel, he looks terrible. His reflection reminds him too much of how Casey looked in those first few days, in that room swaddled in blankets and humid from how he and Marcus prayed as the demon laughed.

 _First Mexican Pope?_ jeers Abuela’s voice, _With that face_? and some colour returns to his cheeks as he flushes in shame. He is not here to look pretty. Marcus jibes, now again, about his looks, and using them to his advantage. He has never understood how to use his body as a weapon. Not as Marcus does. He seems to know how to use every inch of him to tell a story. To make someone spill their secrets. To trust without merit. Tomas is just handsome, sometimes. A gift he does not have the means to use.

He returns to the main room, where Katrina and Marcus are waiting, and tries to set his shoulders, to walk in a way that says _you can trust me. I know what I’m doing._ like Marcus does. He smiles briefly at the huddled group of adults speaking to each other quietly, a group of kids listlessly playing Wii in the corner, the teenagers near them that glare at him mistrustfully. God sent him here. He can help. He must.

Marcus looks him over from head to toes between blinks, from where he still lounges on the cot, silently judging whether or not Tomas is capable. He flushes further, ashamed, and begins to feel sweat prickle between his shoulder blades. How shameful to be a burden instead of a brother in arms. This is not what Tomas wanted. Tomas will never learn to stop wanting, it seems. He stands near Katrina, close enough to hear her, but far enough that she is hopefully not repulsed by the sight and smell of him. “I’m sorry to make you wait, ma’am. Thank you for your patience. Can you tell me what you’ve been dealing with?”

She sucks in a slow breath through pursed lips. Her front teeth are significantly larger than the rest, and slightly yellow, perhaps from age, or too much coffee, or both. She does not look like a smoker. He wonders if she speaks with her mouth near closed not because of her accent, but because a sheriff with bunny teeth may not paint a serious enough picture. “You all probably know better than we do. We don’t put a lot of stock in airy-fairy stuff ‘round here. Hell,” she gestures to the room around her, “we don’t even have a regular pastor. A man drives in from the town over to give Sunday service before he drives right back. So we weren’t doing no equivocating when we say things got weird. I’m not even real sure what I saw.”

He looks her in the eye, and she is unflinching. “There are times when the possessed can… distort what you see. Take a loved one or something you trust and twist it into a perversion of what you know.” He swallows around the sudden tightening of his throat, a nervous tick safely hidden by his collar. “Tell me, do you trust your senses?”

There is no hesitation. “Yes.”

“Do you trust them now?”

 

* * *

 

“That wasn’t bad.” Marcus says, stripping off his outer shirt one fiddly button at a time. “Use the kicked dog face as often as you can.”

Tomas glares at him from across the room, eyes bruised like a death mask. “I don’t have a kicked dog face.” He scrubs harder with the washcloth, irritation rising red in its wake. Marcus can trace it from neck to wrist. Knows that the fear sweat that Tomas is trying to abrade from his skin needs time and a hot shower and real soap to wash away, not just the pink shit hand soap ubiquitous to public spaces everywhere which is acrid and nauseatingly floral at once. Thinks about getting Tomas, whose torso is so tense it hurts to look at to sit down on the counter and to let his shoulders sag. Of working his shoes and socks off, gently, one at a time, like they had forever and not five minutes. Marcus’ trembling fingers fumbling at Tomas’ belt, guiding his trousers off his legs. Tomas near bare, brown skin washed too pale in the light, and a jar of fragrant ointment, and Marcus on his knees. Marcus pressing his thumbs into the skinny arch of his feet, smoothing over the jut of his ankle. How good it would feel, to be his disciple, briefly. How good it would be to serve in peace, just once. Marcus’ service to God has been written in the pain of others. His has not been a work of love. And if after he had cleaned Tomas’ feet, and his legs and his belly and his chest, had soothed his winter-dry skin to quiet, Toms would embrace him like a brother, briefly, that Marcus would radiate God’s love like the sun, briefly, briefly.

Marcus bites at the inside of his cheek, and ignores the warmth that’s pooled inside his sternum, at curses at his trembling hands that can’t even catch at the bottom of his undershirt that he aspires to settle on another’s skin. Turns his skinny chest to the wall and rubs his own washcloth too hard under his armpits. When he’s pulled his undershirt back on and turns back to Tomas, he’s flushed fever bright, shoulders hunched up by his ears.

“You alright?” Marcus goes to press the back of his hand against Tomas’ forehead and he flinches. Any warmth in Marcus chills. “Don’t be a child, Tomas, let me take your bloody temperature.”

He scowls, at winces as it pulls at his stitches, the idiot. “It’s not really accurate.”

“It doesn’t have to be accurate, you feel more like an oven range than a person.” Marcus says, yanking his hand away. “You’re staying here, and drinking water and resting until I can touch you without getting a first degree burn.”

Tomas stomps away and begins angrily rifling through his bag. “You don’t touch me anyway, so it’s not a problem.” He says to a sweater that doesn’t deserve such rough treatment.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Tomas’ scowl deepens even further, and he can see blood beginning to seep into fresh gauze like wine may on an altar. “It doesn’t mean anything. You can’t leave me behind. You said yourself you’d never seen anything like this before.”

“Because I haven’t. But,” he says, and to his horror, hears his voice turning snide and mean, “since you’re so keen on remembering what I’ve said, best recall Chicago. Remember when I said I could take care of things without you? That hasn’t changed.” He sneers. “‘sides, it’s more likely to be one demon jumping bodies than anything, or making them think that it’s jumping around.”

“But you don’t _know_ .” Tomas says, throwing the sweater down. “You’d never seen anything like Chicago before Chicago. There _could_ be multiple possessions here. One priest can’t take down three demons at once.”

“One priest can’t. One _exorcist_ , which I am, can. Thinking you’re _so_ special is going to get you in trouble, Tomas.” He swallows in a bid to wet his mouth which has suddenly gone dry for no particular reason. “I won’t have your blood on my hands because I let you make a stupid mistake.”

“Luckily,” Tomas says, tugging on his sweater violently, and it catches on his ears, making his angry flush darken, “you don’t get to make that choice for me. I’m here, I want to help and you made _me_ connect with the sheriff. I’m going whether you like it or not.”

Tomas’ pupils are blown black, and Marcus can see sweat beginning to bead at his temples. He’s radiating warmth like a furnace. Marcus wants to shake him. Marcus wants to brush his lips against the soft of Tomas’ cheek. Tomas steps into him, and Marcus begins to sweat himself from the heat of him. He places a hand against Marcus’ elbow, so feather light that Marcus could be imagining the press of his fingertips. “Marcus. God gave me a job to do. Perhaps, he says, mouth hinting at a smile, eyes dancing feebly, “I will puke on a demon, see how they like it.”

“Gross.” Marcus declares. “You are a terror not fit to walk among the rest of us.”

“It could work!” Tomas protests. “A taste of their own medicine.”

“I didn’t say it couldn’t work. I said it was gross. If the sight of you doesn’t shock it back to hell, your projectile vomit certainly could.”

Tomas chuckles, and Marcus feels it through the palm he’s rested on the ball of his shoulder without thought. He claps Tomas on the back to hide his flinch. “Right. Well.” His hand is sweaty and too hot, like he’d held it against a flame. He rubs it against his pant leg, frowning. He can’t remember why he didn’t want to bring Tomas along. “Try to give me a little warning so I don’t get caught in the spray. And for God’s sake, stop moving your damn face. I know for certain bleeding on them doesn’t do shit.”

Tomas’ face is solemn as he traces an x over his chest. “Cross my heart,” he says. “No bleeding on demons.”

“No bleeding at _all_ ,” Marcus says as he clasps a hand at the back of Tomas’ neck and pushes him towards the bathroom door.

“No bleeding at all.” He says. Marcus means to ask him if it’s hot in here, but it’s probably not important. He wonders why his hand is so warm.

* * *

 

Katrina is grim as she unbolts the door to let them out. “We’ll expect you back in three hours, max. If you’re not back before then, we don’t let you in, no matter how much you whine. If you’re back on time, you give us the code. If the code is right, we let you in. Then,” she says, hesitating, “we make you drink the water you blessed. If nothing happens, y’all are okay. If your heads rotate 360 degrees, you’re probably evil and we’re screwed. Sound about right?”

“If the possessed can freely walk onto church grounds and doesn’t get knocked down a peg by the holy water, probably.” Marcus says cheerily. “But that won’t happen.” Katrina’s look could bore through steel. “Probably.” He amends. “Feel very free to shoot us. If you kill the body being possessed, you’ll kill whatever’s possessing it.”

“And you.”

“And me.”

She sucks on her teeth consideringly. “I won’t kill you unless I need to kill you.”

Marcus smiles at her sunnily. “That’s more than I’d get from most. We’ll be back, Katrina. Don’t worry about us.”

She snorts. “I ain’t worried at all. ‘pparently travelling ex-or-cists,” she drawls, accent thickening on the last word, “just wander ‘round for when you need ‘em. I’m sure the next pair would be here before the night is out.”

He sniffs. “Here I was worried about your pretty little head fretting about us being in danger. Should’ve known you’d be cold.”

Katrina’s hand edges closer to the pistol on her belt. “If you make any more comments about my pretty little anything you ain’t gonna have to worry about demons.”

Tomas, who had been oddly quiet, makes an impatient sound. “We’re losing light.”

Marcus glances back at him, but there’s nothing to read. He stands there, impassive. “Be safe, Katrina. We’ll be back before you know it.” With that, Katrina wrenches the door open, and he and Tomas step outside into the still grey. “Be careful,” she says, and the door closes heavily behind them, the bolt thudding into place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOO HOO HOO THIS IS THE LAST TRANSITION CHAPTER BEFORE I GET 2 SHARE A SCENE I WROTE MONTHS!!!! MONTHS AGO!!!!! THE REASON I WROTE THIS WHOLE DING DANG THING. only took..... 15000 words to get there.... its fine..... writing is a great hobby....
> 
> hope you enjoyed xoxo


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!! Please note that the tags have been updated, as has the fic rating, for a REASON. This chapter does contain a scene of deeply dubious consent. If that is not your cup of tea, you can read up to the second line break without fear. You can skip down to the chapter end notes for a quick synopsis of the dubious consent scene if you're not sure if it's gonna be an issue.

Marcus leads the way, shoulders set and tense beneath his leather jacket, which it is too cold for, but Tomas has not been able to convince him to buy a proper winter coat. He’s wearing the hat. Tomas is very fond of the hat. It is two parts ridiculous, one part practicality, and indicative of Marcus’ overall understanding of ‘blending in.’ It’s ludicrous, the things he considers subtle, if perhaps not surprising.

Tomas would like very much to admire the line of his shoulders, how his legs eat up distance, but he cannot. He is the reason Marcus is tense.

He stops dead in his tracks, long enough that Marcus turns back to him, looks at Tomas until he picks up the pace once more. The silence is absolute, save for the sound of their breath, boot soles against pavement.

Beside him, Auntie shuffles, unusually fast for the bulk of her. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’ve forgotten already. It’s hard to get anything to stick in your head when you’re used to depending on your face, eh?” Tomas picks at the cut on his hand again instead of meeting her eyes. Blood wells up from where he’s broken the scab. He frowns. It should be poppies. “Boy.” Auntie says impatiently. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, Auntie, I’m listening.”

She huffs, and reaches into her apron pocket. “I’ve been soft on you.” She says between chews. “If I’d ignored Auntie while I apprenticed, she’d take my tongue away until I’d learnt my lesson. Never hurt me none. Turned out the better, I think. Makes me consider whether I should be teaching in the old ways.”

“I’m sorry, Auntie, I wasn’t ignoring you, I was trying to remember. Please. Tell me why.” There is a bristled leg stuck between her front teeth. It doesn’t seem to bother her. Tomas can’t ignore the itch.

“He’s angry because the demon was close, and it got away when you fainted like a pussy were his exact words. Poor Saint Marcus had to tend at your sick bed instead of doing his fucking job. I’d be pissed too if my apprentice’s weakness lead to a monster dancing free to hurt others all it wants. And it does want.” She wraps a hand around his wrist, as sturdy and unforgiving as a manacle. “You won’t do it to me, Tomas.” It is not so much a warning as a truth. Tomas will be used for augury, not apprenticing, if he disappoints her.

Marcus calls his name from up ahead, and Auntie lets go of his wrist with a sniff, falling behind, another cricket already snapping between her teeth.

“Sorry, sorry.” He says, as he jogs up to Marcus. “What do you think?”

He scowls. “I don’t know what to think. It’s bloody weird and- stop. Stop picking at your hand.”

Tomas looks down in surprise. The scab is completely picked off, his fingernails red and tacky. “Sorry.” He repeats. “I didn’t mean it.”

Marcus looks at the edges where the top layer of skin ends and where coagulation begins for a long moment. “Give me your hand.”

He’s clutching it protectively against his chest before he realizes it. “No. I’m okay. I’ll leave it alone.”

“Give me your hand. Please.” Marcus’ palm upturned, fingers fanned out like an invitation, a face he hasn’t worn before.

Tomas wavers. He hears Auntie chewing behind him, a sound like broken glass. “I’m okay.” He repeats. Marcus can’t think he’s weak. “Let’s keep going.” Doesn’t want to see the sneer Marcus wore as he woke up poorly rested, that he remembers so clearly now that he’s been reminded.

He stares at Tomas for a long moment before his eyes are hidden underneath the brim of his hat. “C’mon, then. We don’t want to keep it waiting.”

“So you think there’s only one?”

“If we’re lucky. Regardless, seems like we need to go this way.”

“Why?”

Marcus stops again to look back incredulously. “What, the lit up diner in the middle of the frozen town not an obvious enough invitation for you?”

“Well, when you put it like that.” Tomas says, and smiles when he sees the hint of a grin of Marcus’ face before he turns away. Keeps smiling despite the way he can feel muscle pulling against thread when he hears an approving growl from Auntie behind him.

“Call me crazy, but I don’t imagine it’s particularly smart to walk into a diner that’s a neon-marquis'd trap.” He wonders if he’s imagining the suture holes worn wider every time he smiles. Wonders if they’d spill poppies when they’re big enough.

Marcus looks back and grins properly this time, sharp. “Lucky for you, there’s no smart in exorcism.”

“Just dumb luck and dumb hats. I see.”

“Oi, watch it you philistine. There’s also sheer bloody mindedness.”

Tomas smiles, a tiny thing that won’t pull the bright from Marcus’ eyes. “How could I forget, when it’s your middle name?”

“That was weak, Tomas. I thought I’d taught you better.” It stings like he thought it would. Auntie snorts from behind them. Tomas’ smile wavers and he ducks his head down.

“Guess you thought wrong.”

* * *

 

He and Marcus stand outside the diner. Right outside- Marcus said there was no point in skulking about in alleyways when it knew exactly where they were anyway. He also said there was no need for a plan. He _also_ said that Tomas was to wait outside.

“ _Absolutely_ not.”

“Absolutely yes,” Marcus says, not looking up from where he’s running his fingers through the rosary, decade by slow decade, “you just lost a shit ton of blood. You went comatose via vision. You shouldn’t even be standing upright, right now, let alone assisting in an exorcism.”

“ _Assisting_?” Marcus’ grip tightens worryingly around the beads, hard enough for Tomas to see bone shining through. There is a stretch where he says nothing and Tomas is too furious to get his leaden tongue to form words. His grip relaxes, and he straightens up from where he’d hunched over his bag, places one warm hand against Tomas’ neck, thumb tucked neatly behind his ear.

“As you said so wisely earlier, this is clearly a fucking trap. I need you out here for when shit inevitably hits the fan. We don’t know where it’s coming from, and we need flexibility in our approach.” His thumb runs softly down the tendon there, just a little, before resting once again, sending a jolt of warmth through Tomas’ stomach, the accompanying guilt that follows almost an afterthought, for once. “I trust you to have my back. Do you trust me?”

He glowers. “I trust you. Even if you enjoy saying shitty manipulative things to get your own way.”

“Not sure what you mean.” Marcus claps him on the shoulder before his hand retreats to safety by his side. He is still close. Tomas almost forgot that Marcus doesn’t stand close to people he trusts, only marks and the possessed. He takes a step back in defense.

“What would you have me do?” His voice wobbles, like he’s hurt, and he prays that Marcus thinks the only thing stinging is his pride.

“Watch. Yell if you see something happening. Come running if you hear anything inside. Try to keep the rest of your blood on the inside. I’m serious, Tomas, stop _picking_.”

“Sorry.” All he seems to do lately is apologize. He shoves his own hands in his pockets. “I hate this plan.”

“I told you, there was no plan.”

“Which is a plan, and it sucks. My nephew could make a better plan, and he’s eleven.”

“Shame we don’t have the budget for a consultant.” Marcus steps in close again, and Tomas _hates it_. “Be safe.”

“You be safe. If I hear so much as a plate break, I’m coming in there.”

“Bless your heart, Tomas. Hopefully you’ll be too busy with all the other demons that’ll come crawling out the manholes to mother-hen me.”

“ _You cannot just say things like that_ ,” Tomas hisses, getting ready to lecture Marcus about the power of words, but it is lost to Marcus’ laughter, the mock salute he throws as he turns his back and walks into the diner, bell chiming cheerily.

* * *

 

It hasn’t been more than five minutes, but Tomas cannot relax, attention strung between the possible horde of possessed that could come rushing through the alleyways (because it seems to be that sort of day) and the dearth of sound coming out of the diner. He keeps getting distracted by the sound of Auntie crunching, but knows better than to complain.

Then, the sound of a plate breaking.

His heart is in his throat as he sprints the ten feet to the door, cursing the blinds over the windows and stupid reckless Marcus and his own stupid self. He wrenches it open, eyes wild and expecting to see bloodshed, Marcus held high off the floor by invisible hands, a demon cackling as its head rotates, and rotates.

What he sees instead is Marcus sitting on one of the shiny metal stools that line the front counter, legs spread, ceramic shards at his feet. The fight drains out of him. “Marcus-”

Marcus slowly pushes another plate off the counter like a cat from one of the youtube videos Olivia likes, and smiles as it breaks and Tomas winces. “Whoops.” He says, index finger still outstretched.

“What the- you scared the hell out of me, what are you doing?!”

His smile turns mischievous. “Doing grand at my job, then, aren’t I? Nothing’s here, so I thought I’d call in my knight in shining armour, give him his due reward for ‘rescuing’ me.”

Tomas stiffens, hands reflexively curling into fists. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He leans back against the counter, vinyl squealing obscenely beneath him, fabric pulled tight over his groin, the length of his legs. He grins, and Tomas is too wrapped up in the blood pulsing doubletime through his veins to think on its cruel twist. His mouth is watering. He wants.

“Come now, Tomasito, I thought you wanted this. Do you think I’m blind? I want you, too. And I don’t want to wait.” His fingers curl, and he beckons.

Tomas nods dumbly and walks forward. When he is close enough to touch, Marcus’s hands settle on his waist, and he looks up, beaming, before he pushes Tomas down. He falls to his knees, stunned. The pain of concrete against bone is muted and unimportant. Slowly, he raises his hands and places them gently on Marcus’ knees, and does not look to see how they tremble. He cannot look away from Marcus’ eyes, heavy lidded, eaten by black. Tomas’ thumb begins to trace over the dips and hollows of bone before it stills- what if this is some test to see if  Tomas has learnt anything at all? What if Marcus dashes him to the floor, mouth twisted in disappointment at his lust for flesh, for Marcus especially, the man who treats him like a brother. If he will weep at Tomas’ perversion of his love, step over him as he heads out the door and leaves him behind despite Tomas’ begging.

Instead, Marcus reaches down and fists a hand in his hair, tight, and Tomas cannot help but moan, nerves alighting trip quick down his spine, the line of his cock heavy and uncomfortable against the seam of his trousers. “Do you want to taste?” Marcus says.

“Yes,” he rasps, and thinks that he could be content with this moment lasting forever, with his palms pressed against Marcus and Marcus’ fingernails raking too hard towards the nape of his neck.

But he has also thought about the weight of Marcus’ cock on his tongue, and the sounds he would make as Tomas pleasured him with his mouth. He has thought of bringing Marcus off and seeing his face drained of tension and filled with love, love, love. In his fantasies, he thought of ablution, of cleaning Marcus with his tongue until no hint of seed remained, no proof of his completion except Tomas’ bruised mouth and the joy on his face, all so Tomas could start again, to hear Marcus shout hoarse and incoherent as his hands scrabbled for purchase against the bed, against Tomas.

His hands reach for Marcus’ belt buckle, and they’re slapped away. The flush of shame is immediate. “Do you not want me to-?”

Marcus smirks down at him. “I think you’ve done enough damage today with your hands Tomas. Use your mouth.”

His face burns as he nods and places his hands on the floor for support. Embarrassment churns hot in his gut as he tries to figure out what to do. He doesn’t know where to put his body in relation to Marcus’. In his thoughts there had only been the soft slide between images without mind to the hard logic of physicality. In his thoughts his hands were clean, not gummed with his own blood and shaking.

Apparently, he takes too long, as Marcus tsks and hauls him in by his collar for a kiss that hurts, teeth buried into his neck, the press of tongue against his skin. “Would’ve thought you’d know your way around a cock,” Marcus pants against him, before sucking on the imprint he’s left with his teeth. Tomas stifles a wail. “Looks like I have to do everything myself around here.”

And before he can blush impossibly further, his face is shoved into Marcus’ crotch, nose pressed flush against his erection. The heat of it is incredible, and without thought, Tomas moans and presses an open mouthed kiss there. Above him, Marcus hisses, and the grip in his hair tightens.

He is unsure how much time passes there, mouthing at the outline of Marcus’ cock through his jeans until the fabric there is so damp that his tongue no longer rasps against the weave. Over the rush of blood in his ears, he can hear Marcus croon “Good, you’re so good Tomas,” and needs a moment to whine against Marcus’ stomach to keep from coming, white hot and sudden at the praise.

“Marcus, please.” He pants, hands fisted tight to hold against the temptation to touch himself. This isn’t about him. He presses his face where it was moments before. “Please, I want to taste you.”

“Well,” Marcus says, as he runs a hand through Tomas’ sweaty hair, darkly amused. “Who would I be to deny you?”

The flat of his palm smooths around the curve of Tomas’ skull before his nails turn inwards, the ragged edge of one stings as it catches against his scalp, a sting that is lost in the want that swamps him as Marcus pulls him off like a toy, an errant pet, to fumble at his belt one handed, to fiddle with his zip until there’s enough room to pull out his cock.

“Is this what you wanted Tomas?” Marcus croons, one hand still tightly wound in Tomas’ hair, the other wrapped loosely around himself as he strokes up, down. It is too much for Tomas, to see Marcus’ long, beautiful, eerie hands that have touched him gently and roughly, hands used to heal and hurt in unequal measure. The familiar clench of muscles cannot be ignored, and he comes, comes in a way that is too akin to pain, and weeps against Marcus’ knee through the aftershocks.

“Goodness gracious.” Marcus says, and Tomas can still hear the lewd brush of skin on skin as he struggles to breathe, eyes clenched tight. “You act like a man who’s never seen a dick before.”

Tomas says nothing. Figures the hot rush of shame that turns him puce red and his silence will say all they need to. Stupid, he curses. Stupid, selfish Tomas, putting himself before others again. This wasn’t about him. He wanted to make Marcus feel good, and came in his pants like a boy experiencing a wet dream, a voyeur to pleasure but not a participant.

“Look at me Tomas.” Marcus says, and his voice is a warning. Tomas looks, and he feels himself twitch pathetically against his thigh at the sight of Marcus fucking into his own hand, slowly, like he has all the time in the world. “Do you still want me Tomas?” He asks, and Tomas can only nod mutely as Marcus twists his wrist and precome shines, pearlescent and lovely at the head. “Do you want me to fuck your mouth?” That question is difficult because of course the answer is yes, but Tomas did not imagine it like this, ever, and he has imagined it a hundred thousand ways. He did not think that they would fall into bed without having even kissed. He did not imagine this… this play, that has none of the good natured humour that permeates the very air around Marcus when he’s happy. Marcus is smiling but the air feels dead. His mind isn’t so foggy now, the cold spread at his crotch wakeful unpleasantly. He wants Marcus to use his mouth, to curse and thrust his way to completion, but he also wants quiet words under thin sheets, fingers running over flesh without purpose besides the simple joy of touch.

There is a slick sound as Marcus rubs his thumb over the slit of his cock and Tomas cannot look away. “I’m waiting, Tomas. I need a yes.”

And how could Tomas deny anything Marcus wanted? “Yes,” he says, and his voice sounds as hoarse as if he’d been sucking Marcus’ cock for an hour now despite the fact that Tomas has not pressed his lips to a single bare inch of him. Marcus reels him in again, and the smell and heat of him are an assault that blurs Tomas’ thoughts, that turn him into something nameless and edgeless that reacts only to the soft slide of Marcus over his tongue, his lips, the grunts that fill his ears, the sudden shock of Marcus coming, hot and too fast to swallow as he chokes and it spills out of his mouth.

“Now that’s a look that suits you.” Marcus says, running a thumb over his lip and pressing his come into Tomas’ rapturous mouth. “The priesthood is wasted on you. I wonder if any leaked out of there.” He muses, before his hand rears back and slaps Tomas’ cheek, where the bandage is, and the pain is nothing like the pain he felt when Marcus was in his mouth, and he doubles over, whinging. 

“What?” Tomas says against him, spots of black shooting across his eyes, and pulls back. This is not play.

“I’m saying,” Marcus is smiling but it doesn’t quite fill the edges of his face. “That there’s no point being married to a Man that doesn’t even put out. Hell,” he laughs. “You can’t even hear God. How could He fill you with His Holy Spirit?”

Realization fills him, a cold, deep well. His face must give it away before his words can, because the demon laughs and spreads its legs further, its cock hard again, bobbing obscenely as it shifts. “You do everything quicker than I imagined,” it mocks in Marcus’ voice.

Marcus’ face shifts, like a rubik’s cube, and the features that had been crafted so carefully turn to Auntie’s smirk. Tomas can hear the wet press of her fingers against her sex. He has closed his eyes. He has turned away. Such revulsion as this cannot be borne. Shame, disgust, they drag at his shoulders. He cannot imagine how Atlas held up the whole world and its follies when Tomas cannot even bear his own.

“I told you trouble was coming.” Auntie sniffs. “You didn’t listen. Not that it’s surprising. It’s not often we run into people so bloated with their own pride and ego that they’re _completely_ blind to an oath.” A slick sound, a satisfied hum. “And you took it. Oh Christ, did you take it.”

Tomas forces his eyelids open, to turn back and look at her. He does not turn to a pillar of salt. That would be an undeserved kindness. “Wretched thing, I cast you out.” It comes out weakly.

Auntie laughs as she twists her wrist before sliding her hand out of her pants. “I don’t think you do, sweetheart. I called you here and you came. I called you apprentice and you answered. When I asked you to go to your knees, you serviced me with _aplomb_. Lucky for you, oaths are about intent and not about aptitude.” She runs her sticky hand down his cheek as he flinches, unable to move. “Why do you think God took you? Used you? You must know it wasn’t for any real talent. No. No. You just want so loudly. I could hear it over a hundred miles. I think God just wanted to shut you up. A shame He didn’t just shove a dick in it. It’s the only thing that’s seemed to quiet you so far.”

Tomas swallows thickly, mind grasping for words that scatter. “The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want.”

Auntie rolls her eyes, and they are Marcus’ eyes. “Oh come on, you can’t think that’s going to do anything, do you?” Abuela’s mouth, soft and wrinkled with age.

“-he leads me to still waters-”

“Stop.” Her fingers dig. “Your God understands a covenant. He’s not coming for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tomas has sex with who he thinks is Marcus and both of them consent, but Marcus is, in fact, a demon. The sex doesn't literally happen, but, y'know, if it happens in your mind...
> 
> -
> 
> if you're still reading this slow, slow fic, thanks for kicking around. You have the questionable delight of reading my first sex scene, which I never thought would be as mean and sad and catholic as it turned out. WELP. AIN'T THAT THE WAY. HAVE A GOOD WEEK.

**Author's Note:**

> Big kudos to margo_kim, whose blog and own exorcist fic inspired me to get off my dumb butt and actually try writing this kind of thing. Unbeta'd, hmu if you're interested in that kind of thing.
> 
> Please don't tell god I started drafting this at christmas vigil, I feel like he's not keen on this sort of thing.


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